Photo by Flay-Lay, Freepix.com
by Beth Sherman
After your father’s death, you go to Ruby Tuesday for the loaded cheese fries and a chocolate chip cookie served warm in a skillet, and you sit at the bar, canoodling with vodka lemonade, sometimes a pineapple rum-infused Mai Tai. Everything tastes faintly sour. Food, drinks, the aftershave of the men who whir around you, not because you’re pretty or friendly, but there’s something in your bottle green sadness that lets them know you’re easy. At home, in bed – a muddle of arms, legs, facial hair, tactics – they pry you open, delicately or roughly, and for a few tangled moments you can focus. Their presence closes a hole in leaky nights. Mornings, you try to remember what you said your name was, send them on their way.
Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.
